The field of the invention relates generally to bills of materials, and more specifically, to methods and systems that provide unified bills of materials.
The bill of materials (BOM) is an official description of a product. As the information contents for a product evolve over the product lifecycle, there is not one, but many bills of materials. Specifically, each bill of materials represents a different functional domain perspective of the product lifecycle. Examples include engineering, manufacturing, sales, and service or support. These bills of materials are often stored in dissimilar databases in different locations since the bills of materials are serving the diverse purposes, for example, of the various groups listed above.
There are generally difficulties in the identification, retrieval, and/or collaboration on a correct bill of materials, even in the networked environment. At least one of the reasons there are difficulties is that generally each site has it's own unique access procedure. In other words, there generally is no standard access procedure between the various sites of large enterprises. Another challenge is to find the correct access method for a desired BOM depending on the system on which the BOM is sourced.
These issues are currently addressed through manual processes. Specifically, accessing a desired BOM is a manual process that includes searching for the BOM location to retrieve the BOM data, even though the BOM data are stored in computing systems. With respect to operations across an enterprise, BOMs are generated, stored, and used, for example, by engineering, manufacturing, and finance domains. Each domain generates a BOM that is distinct from the BOMs associated with other domains. Therefore, the various BOMs are often not consistent, nor compatible with each other in terms of contents and data types making it unbearably difficult for the users to intuitively find the desired BOM data. At least one reason for these difficulties is because there are no embedded semantics in the procedure. User difficulties increase when the BOM systems need scaling-up or down to accommodate business demand changes. To ease the increasing difficulties, the BOM database may be replicated between remote sites. However, the replication process is complex, slow, and error prone especially when product configuration changes are frequent.